Wireless communication

The following faculty members participate in research related to wireless communication:

Wireless communications is a highly technical area that involves all aspects of how to transmit and receive information over the wireless spectrum. This includes the study of wireless communication channel effects and modeling (e.g., multipath effect, Doppler effect, fading, shadowing, frequency selectivity), the study and design of modulation techniques that are effective in challenging wireless environments, multi-antenna techniques (i.e., MIMO - Multiple Input Multiple Output) for wireless channels, error control coding techniques suitable for wireless channels, multiple access techniques, and mobility and resource management in wireless networks. The commercial and economic reasons for the area of research are compelling. New wireless access technologies and bandwidth intensive applications such as smartphones are at our doorstep making the need for efficient spectrum usage pressing. The research programs in this area at the University of Waterloo span, to name a few, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Cognitive Networks, Error Control, Coding Theory, Information Theory, Multi Hop Networks, etc. The research is actively funded by NSERC (Strategic and CRD grants) and ORF, with active involvement of companies such as RIM and Huawei. The department has a dozen faculty or so in the broad area of communications, all of which are involved to some extent in Wireless Communications. Graduate students in this area are exposed to many advanced graduate courses and advanced research that leads to publications in conference and journals such as the IEEE transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transaction on Information Theory, IEEE Journal Selected Areas of Communications, etc. Graduating students have found employment either as postdoctoral fellows in companies such as RIM, Bell, and Huawei, or as faculty members at other universities.